Lion King and Hamilton Online Ticket Lotteries Begin

Posted on January 06, 2016

Lion King Introduces Online Lottery Tickets for $30

The no.1 show on Broadway, Disney's Lion King, has announced the opening of a $30 ticket lottery that is only available online. Disney has been interested in doing a discounted ticket lottery for some time, but being the top selling show on Broadway they were very concerned that ticket brokers would game the system and ruin any chance of making the process fair and equitable for the fans of the show, rather than a vehicle for ticket brokers to make money on the back of the show. Being the number one show on Broadway means that they have a large target on their back and any misstep could result in huge losses and brand damage to the long-running success story that is Lion King on Broadway. In partnership with its landlord (Jordan Roth's Nederlander Group) Disney has been able to deliver a working solution that is both fair and equitable, that also keeps out ticket brokers intent on nabbing and reselling tickets for profit.
The Lion King ticket lottery is open to everyone and show fans can go to the website between 7PM and 9AM to enter. Winners are drawn at 10AM every day and you can only win once per year. 2 tickets per person are allowed. Multiple requests for the same day will be entrants banned as will entries from ticket broker IP addresses. The lottery winners will be informed via email and have 60 minutes to pay via credit card. Seat availability is at the discretion of the show Box Office and tickets cannot be given to someone else or transferred to other shows, Winners will need to use government-issued ID to pick up the tickets from the box office on the day of the show.
The website to enter the Lion King ticket lottery is: https://lottery.broadwaydirect...

With its Broadway show tickets fetching over $2500 on the after-market ticket broker network, it is no surprise that fans of Hamilton have been flocking to the on-street ticket lottery where the best seats in the house go for just $10 to the lucky winners. Book Of Mormon has being doing it for years, but Hamilton's success has got the better of its well-intentioned ticket lottery for $10. The popularity of this amazing offer has caused many problems on the street outside of the Richard Rodgers Theatre at 226 West 46th Street, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people spewing onto the street in a bid to hear the announcement and accompanying rendition of the shows music and songs performed by the show cast to keep the line entertained. Neighbors and the NYC police have finally got fed up and demanded that the show modify their ways, which has resulted in the creation of an online lottery system, that is now only available over the internet, so fans will miss the whole experience of being outside the show and getting the a high degree of entertainment value of being in-the-mix. The initial online launch of the ticket lottery was a disaster with the broadwaydirect.com website, that provides the Hamilton lottery crashing after 50,000 people tried to get access, including hundreds of ticket brokers using bots that are able to buy thousands of tickets in just seconds. The IT department at the Nederlander group, who owns the theatre, will regroup and make some strategic changes to cut down on the traffic and will relaunch the service. Until then, the lottery will go back to being on the street, where it is causing chaos for both traffic, police, neighbors and other Broadway Theatres.
The website to enter the Hamilton ticket lottery is located at: https://lottery.broadwaydirect...

More Broadway Show Ticket Lotteries Expected To Move Online

With the chaos that in-person Broadway ticket lotteries can create on the street in NYC, it is expected that more of the popular Broadway shows will move to this model of only offering ticket lotteries online. One company that specializes in Broadway ticket lotteries is todaytix, that only allows the user to enter the ticket lottery via their mobile device. This company has missed out on many of the recent shows that have switched to online lotteries as those shows have wanted to encourage the non-mobile users to enter the lottery, as mobile users are often visitors to NYC - the very demographic that they do not want to cannibalize in terms of ticket sales.
The whole point of the ticket lottery is to drive ticket sales of full-price tickets, using the lottery as way of cheap advertising about the show. As more Broadway shows start offering ticket lotteries, the attraction of the ticket lottery will become less over time and its overall value to the show will wane, but there seems to be a great deal further to go before that burn-out point is reached.
With all of the top five shows on Broadway - Wicked, Lion King, Aladdin, Book of Mormon and Hamilton all now offering ticket lotteries, expect to see record numbers of entries into this process and more website crashes before things settle down. The early adopters of the ticket lotteries: Wicked, Aladdin and Book of Mormon are still doing in-person, on the street lotteries, but are expected that to change the web based versions over time.